1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an apparatus for transferring advertising content to a mobile telephone; it relates also to a method of selecting appropriate advertising content to display in association with applications running on a mobile telephone.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is becoming increasingly common to show advertisements on a mobile telephone. The typical approach, exemplified by the AdMob™ service, is for a publisher of a mobile web site (e.g. a WAP site) to add some lines of AdMob code to their web site. An advertiser creates an advert, sends that advert to a central AdMob server and then bids on that server to have it included on selected mobile web sites. The server analyses bids and sends adverts that have the highest bids to the appropriate mobile web sites, so that those adverts are displayed on mobile telephones when users view those web sites with a browser. When a user clicks on an advert on a mobile web site, the advertiser pays both AdMob and the owner of the mobile web site. Advertising systems such as this have an important role to play because they can encourage people to create new mobile web sites and enable mobile users to locate products and services of interest.
One limitation of this typical approach is that it works only with mobile web sites (e.g. WAP sites)—i.e. sites that are seen and interacted with using a browser application running on the mobile telephone. Although browsers are commonplace, the experience of interacting with mobile web sites using a browser can be poor. Also, adverts may not be relevant to an end-user and hence may be irritating (conversely, if adverts that are genuinely useful to end-users could be displayed on a mobile telephone at the right time, then it is likely that click-through rates would be relatively high, given the closer relationship many users have with their mobile telephones, compared with their desktop PCs.)
Further, mobile telephones and PDAs are becoming increasingly powerful and able to run multiple local applications (e.g. Java applications) very quickly; these make WAP sites appear very cumbersome. But to date, there has been no viable and effective way of displaying advertising on these local applications.